Communication problems - the £30 million mistake!

I have used Chinese Whispers in the past to illustrate potential problems in communication but as most businesses tend not to use this method of passing messages along it has never been directly applicable to the issues of mistakes being made due to workers hearing the wrong message. But now, thanks to Manchester City, I have an excellent example and I used it to formulate a little class activity as well!

Garry Cook, the ex-CEO of Manchester City revealed the mistake in the new book - “The Manchester City Years” by Gary James. It was 2009 and Shiek Mansour had just taken over at the club and was finalizing his plans.

One executive made the comment along the lines of “it’s all getting messy”. Via the telephone and other communication lines this translated into “Get Messi” and a £30 million bid was tabled for the superstar. Barcelona rejected the bid and Manchester City bought Robinho for £32 million instead.

After sharing this with my class, I got them into groups and asked them to create a skit where a similar misunderstanding led to significant consequences for a business. I got them to find a glossary or index of Business terms which would help them with the task (and hopefully allow them to revise / learn some new words as well).

The best efforts were:

- one group had a the management of a pet food business in the boardroom discussing their products in terms of the Boston Matrix. The CEO announced they needed to “kill the dogs” which led the inexperienced productions manager to put poison into the dog food cans…

- a cleaning products company finance manager announcing that the acid-test ratio was too low, leading the business to add more acid to their products with terrible results….

- a tyre company owner complaining that inflation was a problem for the business, leading to the R&D department making the tires poorer quality so that they were easier to inflate.

So something a little different for illustrating communication problems and the students had a good time putting together and acting out their skits!